


I'm Still Here (But All Is Lost)

by Willowe



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Steve isn't really an asshole but Tony is Not Okay and is projecting a little, also mostly no dialogue until a few lines towards the very end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-06-09 21:54:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6924874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willowe/pseuds/Willowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All he knows how to do in this situation is protect the people he cares about. But there’s no more team, no one left to keep safe, and Tony is utterly lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Still Here (But All Is Lost)

**Author's Note:**

> I watched CA:CW once and cried about Tony for the three days it took to write this.
> 
> Title from The Mountain Goats song "Cry for Judas".

It’s always a little too quiet, these days.

Tony tells himself that he doesn’t mind, that he likes the peace, but he’s never done well with this sort of stillness. It’s like the whole compound is holding its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never happens.

There are things that Tony could be doing, of course, but somehow they never seem important enough to waste energy on. He’s listening to the suggestion of his PR people to stay quiet, for once, to avoid interviews and paparazzi and talk shows until this mess blows over. Truthfully, the thought of having to talk about what happened makes Tony’s chest tighten uncomfortably and he’s grateful for their stern orders to stay out of the public view. He doesn’t think he has it in him to spin the story like he usually would.

And what could he even say, really? More than half of the Avengers are now wanted fugitives. Of those that remain, Natasha still isn’t talking to him after that double-agent comment and Tony can’t exactly cop to bringing a teenage vigilante to Germany to fight against super soldiers and trained heroes. T’Challa is back in Wakanda, busy running his kingdom, and Vision is now even more reclusive than ever. And Rhodey may be steadily recovering but there’s still no telling when he’ll be able to fly the War Machine armor again.

If he’ll ever fly again.

Ross is pressuring Tony to find someone else to put in the armor, even threatening to confiscate it and choose someone himself, but Tony destroyed the old War Machine armor and is refusing to rebuild it. He tells Ross that the new schematic isn’t finished yet; in truth, he’s waiting to see what happens with Rhodey before deciding whether to remake the armor or retire War Machine altogether.

The Avengers are a shadow of their former strength. Tony’s faction- because that’s what they are, right? a fucking _faction_ , a team within a team, the group that tore the Avengers apart- has standing orders to take down their former teammates by whatever means necessary. But right now they don’t have the means, because Vision doesn’t trust his own abilities and Natasha doesn’t trust Tony not to screw everyone over and Rhodey is out of the picture altogether. And Tony doesn’t know what he thinks anymore, doesn’t know what’s the right course except to keep stalling and buying as much time as he possibly can before making a decision.

So Tony spends his days dodging Ross’s calls and sticking close to Rhodey, helps him with his physical therapy as much as he can and gets input from him about his new legs, what’s working and what still needs to be tweaked. And then he spends his nights locked down in his workshop, drinking and modifying Rhodey’s new aids until he’s finally forced to admit that they’re as good as they’re going to get. For now, at least. Tony doesn’t think he’ll ever stop tweaking them, doesn’t think he could live with himself if he ever just quit, but he’s already designed them to automatically calibrate to Rhodey’s strength level on any particular day and there’s not too much more he can do at the moment.

And then… and then Tony is at a loss. Because sure, there are projects he can be working on. There are always new things to invent, after all. But Tony is lost, and everything is too quiet and too empty, and his friends are hurt and scattered and still reeling, and all Tony knows how to do in this situation is _make things safe_. Upgrade security. Redesign the team’s weapons and body armor. But there’s no more team, no one left to keep safe, and Tony is utterly lost.

So he upgrades Natasha’s Widow Bites, her body armor, crafts paper-thin but dangerously strong knives that she can hide on her person, all as a peace offering that he knows won’t go far enough towards fixing his mistakes. He reinforces Bruce’s Hulk-proof rooms, even though he knows that if Bruce does decide to resurface it won’t be Tony that he comes to see, not anymore. There’s nothing Vision needs and Tony can’t think of anything to entice Thor back to Midgard and if he throws more tech at Rhodey his friend may actually kill him.

But he still works and reworks the schematics for new War Machine armor, building in safeguards to stop this from ever happening again, putting in so many new safety features that he has to spend days debugging them all so they don’t try to constantly override each other. He designs the suit to be compatible with Rhodey’s walking aids and then he designs a second suit with built-in aids instead because the simulations show that Rhodey would be safer with only one layer of metal encasing his body instead of two.

He redesigns the Spider-Man suit he made for Peter, because the first version was good but it could be so much better. Tony sends it off to the teen, along with schematics and suggestions for new webshooters, and waits for a response. He never gets one but hey, what’s a cold shoulder from one more person, right? After all he did nearly strand the kid in Germany. There are worse repercussions he could be facing for his fuck-ups than a little bit of radio silence, so he’s willing to count this one as a win.

Tony lies to Rhodey about how much time he’s spending in his workshop, and most days Rhodey is too tired after PT to push the issue. Tony’s still on the outs with Pepper, will probably always be on the outs with her after this latest fiasco, neither Vision nor Natasha are going to drag his ass away from his work, and there’s no one left who could even pretend to care. He gets black-out drunk more nights than he cares to admit to, wakes up and pours the rest of his alcohol down the drain only to go out and buy another bottle two days later, because at least if he’s locked in his workshop and too drunk to leave he can’t do anything else stupid.

Tony rebuilds his armor. Then rebuilds it again, because it will never be good enough, because he needs to be doing something and this is all he has left. If Barton was still around he’d be making new arrows for him to try out. If Sam was here Tony would be pestering him until he got the okay to recalibrate the wings, to check them for damage after the battle, to make subtle upgrades that he always thinks will go unnoticed but never do.

If Wanda was here he’d make her armor of her own so she’d be safe even if she got distracted in battle. Even if the people around her got distracted. Steve’s newest recruit has tech that Tony’s only ever heard about, never seen first-hand, and what he wouldn’t do to get his hands on that gear…

Tony doesn’t think about Steve, doesn’t think about Barnes, the memory of their last encounter still too painful for Tony to dwell on. He destroyed the note from Steve with his apology, too risky to keep it around, even locked up in the compound, but his damn photographic memory makes it impossible to forget the words. Tony isn’t angry, isn’t seething with rage anymore, but that doesn’t mean the revelation about his parents’ deaths hurts any less and he’s dealing with it all the same way he deals with everything: by ignoring it, and drinking, and burying himself in his workshop.

He rebuilds his armor again. He scraps War Machine’s schematics, redesigns it from the ground-up for the third time since Rhodey got injured. He organizes repairs for the compound, tests a new repulsor system in his gauntlets, categorically doesn’t think about Steve or Bucky or-

Tony runs out of things to do, things to build, things to fix. He designs new arrowheads for Barton, even if the man will never get a chance to use them, because he can do this in his sleep and it stops his brain from tearing itself apart in guilt when the alcohol stops being enough. He designs armor for Wanda, then redesigns it to be more compatible with her powers. He builds an entirely new set of wings for Sam, then destroys the prototype so they can’t be seized by the government. No one is allowed to fly like that, except Falcon.

He doesn’t think about Steve, or Barnes, or an abandoned Hydra outpost in the middle of Siberia. He doesn’t think about the feeling of Steve ripping his faceplate off, smashing his shield into the arc reactor in the suit until it shut down, throwing Tony clear across the room-

He doesn’t think about how it felt to tear Barnes’s arm clean off, as easily as he tore apart the team, because now that the anger has died down there’s only a horrible, clawing guilt left behind. If someone did that to Rhodey, if someone tore his walking aids away from him and left him lying defenseless on the floor-

Tony feels like vomiting.

Steve had called the Avengers Tony’s family, but most of them are still with him and Tony is alone, like he deserves. Family, after all, doesn’t tear itself apart like Tony ruined the team, but Tony’s familial experiences have never been friendly and clean so it only makes sense that he finally broke the one good thing he had going for him.

Tony finally caves and designs a new Captain America suit, one that can withstand everything Iron Man could ever throw at it even if that’s a completely unnecessary upgrade because Tony never could beat Steve, even when he was trying. And he’s not sure he wants to try anymore.

He doesn’t upgrade the Iron Man suit to withstand the strength of super soldiers. Tony knows that, more often than not, he needs someone to be able to stop him. But there’s no one left to put him back in his place, to beat some sense into him and talk him down from the ledge, and he doesn’t want to think about that, doesn’t want to think about what happened and why the compound is so quiet these days. But everywhere he looks there’s another reminder of just how badly he fucked up this time and Tony can’t take it anymore.

He’s running on about three hours of sleep over the last 72 hours, because Rhodey is down in D.C. for some new treatment and there’s no one left to care if he leaves the lab at all, when he opens a blank worksheet and begins designing something entirely new. He doesn’t name the project, doesn’t give a title to what he’s doing. He hides it so deep in his files that it would still take the best hacker in the world a solid two days to find the damn thing, and then he hides it even deeper, just to be safe.

Tony works on it for a week straight, sleeps only in sporadic fits, eats whenever he remembers to order takeout which is never often enough. He fine tunes it almost as much as he obsessively modified Rhodey’s legs, or his own Iron Man armor, and when it’s as good as it can get without outside input he steps back, downs a glass of whiskey, and passes out for close to 32 hours.

When Tony wakes up he has a splitting headache, four missed calls from Rhodey, and a finished schematic for a robotic arm so well hidden in his files that with his hangover it takes him nearly half an hour to find it.

It’s incredibly well-designed, of course it is, but it’s also an absolutely pointless project. Tony’s half-convinced that if he even tries to make an actual prototype he’ll have half the U.S. military descending on the compound, and he still needs input from Barnes before he can finish the damn thing anyway and he can’t exactly get in touch with-

Tony stills.

He could, though. He could get in touch with Barnes, because sitting in a locked and hidden safe is the burner phone that Steve sent to him. But that would mean getting in touch with Steve, talking directly to Steve for the first time since their fight.

What the fuck would he even say to the man? Sorry I tried to kill you and got basically your entire team arrested and ripped your best friend’s arm off his body but hey, I built him a new one so are we cool?

Yeah. That would go over well.

Tony chases away most of his hangover with another swig of whiskey and about four cups of coffee, calls Rhodey back to assure him that he isn’t dead, and tries not to think about the schematics still hidden deep in his files. Schematics, plural, because he still has the plans for Clint’s arrows and Wanda’s armor and everything else he’s made for a team that’s not his anymore.

Schematics that he has to do something with because they can’t live on his private servers forever, even if he wants them to. There’s no one who’s capable of hacking into his private servers, not without him finding out and immediately stopping them before they got to anything, but Tony still can’t trust that. It’s too dangerous having these files just lying around and it would be better for everyone if he got rid of them somehow and… and…

Rhodey’s on his way back from D.C. and Tony should wait for him. Or at least call him, discuss this over, get a second opinion because he doesn’t have a great track record when he rushes off into plans of his own. But the less people that know about this, the better.

There’s only one contact in the phone, listed under just the letter A, and Tony doesn’t know if that’s supposed to stand for _America_ or _Avengers_ or just a guarantee that it will always be the first contact in the phone. It doesn’t matter, really, because Tony knows who the contact is for even before he presses the dial button with shaky fingers.

It rings once, twice, and then the call connects but there’s no greeting. Just the sound of quiet breathing down the line and shit, was this Rogers’ idea of a joke?

“…hello?” he tried, and there was immediately a relieved huff through the phone.

“Tony.” And yeah, that’s Steve, there’s no doubt about it, and some of the tension bleeds out of Tony’s frame at the sound of his voice. “What is it? What do you need?”

And isn’t that the million-dollar question? “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

Steve sighs again. “Stark…”

“I need to talk to Barnes,” Tony says quickly, before he can lose his nerve.

“What?”

Steve doesn’t sound happy, does not sound happy at all, and Tony can’t blame him so he’s quick to explain, “I, uh. Look, I know I fucked up. A lot, in a lot of ways, and I- Destroying Barnes’ arm was crossing a line I know that, and I… designed a schematic for a new one?”

“A schematic,” Steve repeats, deadpan.

Tony can’t read him over the phone like this, over a crappy cellphone connection on a model that’s a least five years out of date, and it makes him nervous, makes him keep babbling out explanations as if that will make the situation better. “Yeah, a schematic but listen, I need to talk to him, get some input on what he needs from it because I ran simulations and analyzed what footage I had but some first-hand info would be-”

“You can’t talk to him, Tony,” Steve interrupts, and Tony falls silent immediately. “He’s back on ice, until we can figure out how to get Hydra out of his head.”

“Oh.”

“And he’s already been built a new arm,” Steve adds, because sure, why not kick Tony while he was down? The one thing he can do to try to make amends and it’s completely useless, in the end.

“Right, right, yeah. T’Challa probably got the Wakandan scientists on that immediately,” Tony says, putting a flippant note in his voice because this conversation isn’t going how he had anticipated and he needs to distance himself from it. Immediately.

“We’re not in-”

“Oh come on, Cap, of course you are,” Tony interrupts. “Only place in the world where you’re actually safe right now, only place with the technology to put Barnes under and build him a new arm- Of course you’re in Wakanda, what sort of idiot do you take me for?”

Steve is silent and Tony sighs in frustration. “The call isn’t being monitored and there’s no one else here. You can at least say _something_ , you know.”

“I can’t take that risk, Stark,” Steve says. “Not with my team on the line.”

 _My team_ , and it’s true, the Avengers are Cap’s team now, but that doesn’t mean that it hurts any less to hear it phrased so bluntly. “Right, whatever, look I have other schematics too, weapon and armor designs for all of you guys, just give me a place to send it and I can-”

“What are you trying to do, Stark?” Steve asks and he sounds tired now, exhausted and worn down and… and did Tony do that to him? Does just talking to Tony make Steve sound like he’s lost every shred of energy that he had left? Was that why he was always fighting with him, always trying to get him to shut up for just one goddamned minute?

“I’m trying to…” To what? Protect a team that he’s not a part of anymore? Keep them safe even though he has standing orders to take them down? “I just wanted to say…” but the word _sorry_ sticks in his throat and without thinking about it he reaches for a bottle of whiskey to wash the apology away.

“Are you drinking?” Steve asks. “Are you drunk right now, Stark?”

And Tony doesn’t say anything because he is drinking now, and he’s pretty sure that he was sober when he made the call but who the fuck even knows anymore?

Steve sighs again, and the sound rips into Tony worse than any words ever could. A new voice comes down the line, muffled as they call out to Cap but it sounds like Clint and god, _god_ Tony wants to talk to him. He wants to talk to all of them, he wants to hear all of their voices just to know that they’re okay. But he lost that privilege when he beat them into the ground and got them thrown into a maximum security prison and burned everything they had to ash.

“Stark, I have to go,” Steve says, and Tony is filled with an immediate _panic_ because Vision is hiding away somewhere and Rhodey isn’t back yet and Natasha- “Look, take care of yourself, okay? Your, uh. The “double-agent” tells me you haven’t been doing a good job at that.”

And that answers the question of where Natasha disappeared to.

“Yeah, yup, I’ll get right on that,” he lies, and takes another swig of whiskey. What’s the point of taking care of himself if he’s alone, if there’s no one left around who actually cares?

Another sigh. Tony almost wants to punch the air out of his stupid lungs all over again.

“Look, I’ll call you back when I can, alright?” Steve says. “I don’t know when that’ll be, but- I’ll call back. Sober up for me, and we’ll- I’ll call you back.”

The line goes dead.

Steve won’t call back, Tony knows that. It was a useless platitude, a way to get Tony off the phone without another a fight. Steve doesn’t trust him- and Steve has every right not to trust him- and he can’t risk calling Tony back just to chat. Steve won’t call him back, and Tony can’t risk the phone falling into Ross’s hands.

It’s too dangerous to keep the phone around. Dangerous for Steve and- and dangerous for Tony. He doesn’t need that reminder of everything he fucked up.

He polishes off the bottle of whiskey and powers up one of his gauntlets.

The phone is obliterated with a single repulsor blast, but he fires off three more, just to be sure.

And then the compound is silent around him again, and Tony is alone. And he tells himself that he doesn’t mind, that it’s better this way, because at least if he’s alone there isn’t anyone left for him to hurt.

He shakes off the gauntlet, picks up another bottle, and takes a long drink. “FRIDAY, delete all of the Avengers schematics off my private server.”

There are things he should be doing. And messing around with designs for a team that wants nothing to do with him isn’t on that list.


End file.
